Team

Staff

Approximate time involvements of BERI's most active staff are given in parentheses after their names below. We do this to combat "affiliation inflation": a pattern where large numbers of teams tend to lay claim to the same over-committed individuals, which ends up exaggerating the appearance of work being done in a field. If more teams begin publically indicating time involvements, it will help the public to judge how much work is happening in specific areas, including existential risk.

Andrew Critch (~1 day/week)

Executive Director

Andrew Critch (email) is currently a full-time research scientist in the EECS department at UC Berkeley, at Stuart Russell's Center for Human Compatible AI. He earned his PhD in mathematics at UC Berkeley studying applications of algebraic geometry to machine learning models. During that time, he cofounded the Center for Applied Rationality and SPARC. Andrew has been offered university faculty positions in mathematics, mathematical biosciences, and philosophy, worked as an algorithmic stock trader at Jane Street Capital's New York City office, and as a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. His current research interests include logical uncertainty, open source game theory, and avoiding arms race dynamics between nations and companies in AI development.

Colleen Gleason (full-time)

Operations & Finance Manager

Colleen is the first full-time employee of BERI and she is excited to be managing operations and finances. She graduated from North Central College with a B.A. in Sociology. She has spent her time since graduating in the tech industry running just about everything from offices to board meetings to company-wide events. She is happy to bring together her love of getting stuff done effectively and efficiently with her desire to mitigate catastrophic risk in her position with BERI. While she is new to the Bay Area and loves the sunshine, she will forever argue Chicago is the greatest city in the country (she admits she has insufficient evidence to back this claim but will argue for it nonetheless).

Josh Jacobson (full-time)

Collaboration Manager & Project Manager

Josh manages BERI's collaboration with the Center for Human-Compatible AI and other BERI projects for existential risk reduction. Prior to joining BERI, Josh served as Data Scientist at Innovations for Poverty Action, a Director at the Centre for Effective Altruism, and as Senior Statistical Machine Learning Fellow at SocialCops in Delhi. Previously, Josh founded and led a social enterprise as CEO while advising startups as a Mentor at Startupbootcamp. His work history includes project management for PepsiCo as a brand manager and for The World Bank as a consultant. Josh holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration – Development Practice from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a BA in Government from Dartmouth College.

Kyle Scott (~4 days/week)

Project Manager

Kyle manages various projects supporting BERI's partner institutions. He graduated Whitman College with a B.A. in Philosophy. He spent two years working in career services and subsequently moved to Oxford where he worked for 80,000 Hours, the Centre for Effective Altruism and most recently at the Future of Humanity Institute as Nick Bostrom's Executive Assistant.

Rebecca Raible (~3 days/week)

Program Manager: Grants & Awards

Rebecca graduated from Pomona College in 2014 with a B.A. in Philosophy. She then spent about two and and a half years as a Research Analyst at GiveWell, producing and updating GiveWell's in-depth top charity reviews. She joined BERI in mid-2017 and now manages BERI's grants program.

Board

Eric is co-founder of Arbital, a platform for finding, reading, and creating crowdsourced, intuitive explanations, developed partly in response to the observation that arguments about civilization-scale priorities like existential risk are complex and in need of better organizational tools for conveying them. He studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, and has previously worked as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft and Amazon.

Alex Flint

Secretary & Director

Alex Flint is Staff Software Engineer at Cruise Automation, which creates autonomous driving technology. Alex joined Cruise after the company he co-founded, Zippy, was acquired. Previously, Alex was Head of Engineering at Kite. Alex holds a DPhil in Engineering from Oxford University and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Adelaide.

Advisors to the Board

Andrew Snyder-Beattie

Director of Research, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford

Andrew Snyder-Beattie is Director of Research at the Future of Humanity Institute, where he coordinates the institute’s research activities, recruitment, and academic fundraising.
While at FHI, Andrew obtained over $2.5m in research funding, led the FHI-Amlin industry research collaboration, and wrote editorials for the Guardian, Ars Technica, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which in total have received over 500,000 readers. His personal research interests currently include ecosystem and pandemic modelling, anthropic shadow considerations, and existential risk. He holds a M.S. in biomathematics and has done research in a wide variety of areas such as astrobiology, ecology, finance, risk assessment, and institutional economics.

Jacob Tsimerman is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, a Sloan Fellow, and the 2015 recipient of the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, an international prize for work in the area of number theory. He obtained his PhD degree from Princeton University in 2011 under the guidance of Peter Clive Sarnak. In 2003 and 2004, Jacob represented Canada in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and won gold medals both years, with a perfect score in 2004. Following his PhD, he had a post-doctoral position at Harvard University as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Malo Bourgon

Chief Operating Officer, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Malo Bourgon oversees operations and program activities at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He also co-chairs the committee on the Safety and Beneficence of Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence of the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. Malo earned a master’s degree in engineering at the University of Guelph.

Matt Fallshaw

Founding team and CIO at Bellroy

Matt Fallshaw serves as Chief Information Officer at Bellroy, a company he co-founded. Matt has also been a product designer & product design manager, a factory & tool room manager, a logistics & supply chain consultant, a programmer & software consultancy manager, and a director of a handful of startups. Matt earned a BE and a BA at the University of Melbourne.

Sam Bankman-Fried

Alameda Research

Sam Bankman-Fried runs Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency trading firm. He is also a member of the board for the Centre for Effective Altruism US and Animal Charity Evaluators. Previously, he served as Director of Development at CEA and earned to give at the quantitative trading firm Jane Street. Sam earned a BA in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh

Executive Director, Center for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh is the Executive Director of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), and is Co-I on CSER’s research projects.
Under his and Huw Price’s leadership, CSER has grown in three years to be a world-leading academic research center on extreme technological risk, and is now funded at £3M+ over 2015–18. Since 2011 he has played a central role in research on long-term AI impacts and risks, project managing the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. He has led an active program of engagement with both policymakers and research leaders in computer science on long-term AI, both in the UK and Europe.
At the Future of Humanity Institute, Sean also helped develop and establish the FHI-Amlin Collaboration on Systemic Risk in 2013, as well as several other research programmes, as part of a broad research and centre development portfolio. His primary research interests include: emerging technologies, risk, technology policy, horizon-scanning and foresight, expertise elicitation and aggregation, genomics, synthetic biology, evolution and artificial intelligence. He has a PhD in genomics.

Stuart Russell

Founder and Lead Principal Investigator, Center for Human Compatible AI

Professor Russell recently founded the Center for Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, where he is a Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum's Council on AI and Robotics.

Stuart has been an outspoken defender of intellectual work directed at mitigating existential risk, specifically future risks from artificial intelligence. He is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the World Technology Award (Policy category), the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award. In 1998, he gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University and from 2012 to 2014 he held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris.